They left Colombia to escape violence hoping to legally apply for asylum in the United States. Tthey were among the first to be deported by the Trump administration. It happened after five flights returned hundreds of Colombian migrants to their home country in the waning days of January, the Washington Post reported on Instagram.
As the new administration got into full swing, applying for asylum instantly became increasingly difficult. One way to halt applications was cutting off established and future appointments with CBP One, a mobile app that offered migrants a legal pathway to apply. Without that option still available, the Colombian family turned themselves in at the border hoping they could keep their scheduled appointment. Within days they were deported.
Another family, profiled on Instagram by Occupy Democrats last month involved three generations, a three-year-old child, her mother, and her grandmother, all American citizens from Puerto Rico who spoke fluent English when they were shopping in a Milwaukee store. Denied the chance to talk to an official they were taken to a detention center where the child was separated from her mother. When presented with birth certificates an officer released them.
An immigrant daughter who graduated from an Ivy League college and later earned a law degree, told a cable TV reporter that she received a call to bring her father to a government office because his green card was pending. He had lived in the U.S. for dozens of years, worked and paid taxes, and never been in trouble with the law so she had no reason to think he would encounter difficulties. But upon arrival the daughter was told to leave the room. When she refused, security escorted her out. When she returned, her father was gone – deported.
Errors, cruel separations, and entrapment is happening in many places. Children are separated from their mothers. People are followed home in their cars by ICE, identified perhaps by a woman wearing hijab or a dark-skinned man spotted in a grocery store. People who contribute to their communities, are vital to our economy, and never disobey the law are dragged away in front of their families. Many are victims of mistaken identity. Stories like these vary but they are similarly painful, heartbreaking and grievous.
Physician-writer Danielle Ofri, writing in The New York Times just after the January election, said that “Doctors and nurses [who are immigrants] should get ready for mass deportations. Patients are scared too. One patient who had multiple chronic health issues told Ofri that she was afraid of being picked up because she would not be allowed to take her medications “in the immigration camps.” She had stopped coming to the hospital for checkups because she was “scared ICE will be in train stations and bus stops.”
As horror stories mount individuals and families are going into hiding, clinging to their children who no longer go to school and who can’t seek healthcare. The price of eggs doesn’t compare to that kind of trauma.
Yet the Trump administration continues to cling to ideas that are built on myth, assumptions, stereotyping, racism and an appalling lack of understanding about what will happen if millions of hardworking, productive, honest, skilled and unskilled workers are forced out of the country.
Historical context is called for here. In 1980 Congress passed the Refuge Act which meant that people claiming political asylum had to meet a set of requirements to qualify for refuge or asylum. But Ronald Reagan chose to view people fleeing political violence in Latin American as economic migrants, a designation that caused many applicants to be disqualified for asylum.
At about that time the government began resisting the sanctuary movement, especially in places of worship. In 1984 the Immigration and Naturalization Service, a predecessor to ICE, launched a full-scale investigation into the sanctuary movement and its leaders. Undercover agents were employed to collect evidence that religion was being used as a covert way to push a radical political agenda and to thus undermine immigration laws.
Soon, leaders of the sanctuary movement were charged with multiple counts of conspiracy to violate federal law. Not long afterwards, sanctuaries began spreading from churches to college campuses, local legislative bodies and state level protections and laws.
Now Donald Trump insists that sanctuary cities are havens of crime so overrun by dangerous immigrants that he needs to have an army of agents like ICE, the National Guard, and the military to control a plague of epic proportions perpetrated by people of color, poor people who have suffered unimaginable violence and persecution. That, of course, demands an expansion of “detention centers” which are, in reality, concentration camps where innocent people and families can languish for years.
“Many of these deportations threaten a range of fundamental human rights including the right to family unity, the right to seek asylum from persecution, the right to humane treatment in detention, the right to due process, and the rights of children,” Human Rights Watch points out.
These rights are being denied by an administration that is hell-bent on making America white again, run by cowards and oligarchs who suck up to and financially support a wannabe lifetime dictator. But as Rebecca Solnit wrote in The Guardian, “The more we stand up, the harder it is for this authoritarian agenda to succeed, and the more uncomfortable we make it for those going along with the lies and cruelty, the harder it will be to persecute any single person who says what’s being done to immigrants is terrorism.
Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.